The Start of October
by bhut
Summary: (AU - no gods). It's the beginning of October, and Reyna is feeling restless. Can her friends cheer her up?


**The Start of October**

_Disclaimer: all characters belong to RR and co._

The weather was unnaturally hot. Considering that this was the start of October, this unnaturalness was doubly so. However, as Reyna (Avila) Ramirez-Arellano, (also known as RA-RA, but only if you wanted to die), was sitting on her usual hidden spot, on a forested hilltop near a railroad, she wasn't musing about the unnaturalness of it all, but was rather watching a train go by.

Reyna loved trains. Maybe not in the way that her friend Leo did, but she still did. Not that she admitted it, because she was not supposed to be the sort of a person… not that there was a problem with trains, (just ask Leo Valdez), but because there was a problem with Reyna. She was the current president of the antique club of Jupiter high school, and as such, trains had no place in her life.

Yes, Leo Valdez would argue that this was stupid, because he was a member of the same club, (even if just a junior one), and he loved trains, but Leo was, well, a grease monkey, just as captain Obvious was captain Obvious. Some people were just in a league of their own, as Leo Valdez was such a person, whereas Reyna…

…whereas Reyna was not. She was not sure just what sort of a person she was supposed to be. Her parents – the original Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez-Arellano – expected her (and her big sister) to go into military, because, a) they were Ramirez-Arellanos, and b), it was the twenty-first century, women have fought and died, (mostly metaphorically, but you could never tell), for equal rights with men, and that included military service, so, ladies, buck up and belt up, and be ready to serve!

…And then their father returned from his last military tour practically a ghost of his old self – a particularly cranky and malignant ghost – and their mother, Bellona, became barely better, and big sis Hylla just up and left both military school and home to lead some sort of a feminist radical paramilitary group – the new Amazons, the local newspapers called them – and suddenly Reyna had no one in her family, (not really), and nothing to look forwards for, (she wasn't going to join Hylla, period)… and then she suddenly found herself in a foster family.

You would think that having that would suck – Reyna had been young enough and, well, girlish enough, to have read various fairy tales that had 'the wicked stepmother' as a stock figure. Instead, she ended up with Maya, the foster mom, who seemed to understand Reyna better than her biological parents even did, and with Brett, the foster dad, who seemed to be just as nervous about Reyna being fostered at their place as Reyna was herself, (not that she would admit it to anyone outside of her family), and who loved dogs as much as Reyna did, so he wasn't evil, at the very least.

This was fine, (though Reyna could have lived without suddenly becoming a big sister to a girl that was almost as old as she herself was…and there was a baby on the way now too. Reyna tried to tell herself that it sucked, but found herself feeling oddly excited instead), but as time went on, Reyna felt oddly restless.

Working and leading the antique club helped, at least for a while, but 'working' was the key word here – for whereas Frank and Hazel made it look fun, as they ran it, (whenever Reyna wasn't around, in the past, and now, in the present, on a permanent level, since Reyna has retired), and for Reyna, it was not. It was something that she was good at, true, very good, but did she want it to direct the remainder of her life? She did not.

That said, what was left for her, outside of ancient Roman, (and Greek, and maybe Egyptian and Norse) history? Reyna had no idea.

"Hey, Rey!"

Reyna shifted and blinked. The Grace siblings, Thalia and Jason, had been her friends a long while now, true, whereas her relationship with Piper McLean was… more detached, but to see all three of them at the same time was… unusual. "Aurum! Argentum!" she addressed the dogs, (which were accompanying the humans) instead. "Buddy!"

The two greyhounds and the Labrador retriever barked happily back – Reyna had to admit that she was one of those people who got along better with animals than with other people, sometimes. And speaking of other people…

"What's up?" she asked instead the siblings (and Piper) in question.

"Dad is going onto one of his spiritual trips into the wilderness," Piper shrugged. "Coach Hedge and others are with him, so it's business as usual. I rather wanted to spend the weekend with Thalia and Jason instead, but they have their own issues…"

"Ah," Reyna nodded sagely: Ms. Grace was really putting the drama into the concept of drama teacher, and everyone tended to tiptoe around her whenever she had one of her little episodes – only they were not that little, as far as too many people were concerned. "She's having one of them, isn't she?"

Both Thalia and Jason nodded solemnly. The siblings didn't look too similar to each other, (there were nasty rumors that they were only half-siblings, that they had different fathers, period, but Reyna and the others ignored them), but they behaved similarly enough to each other instead.

"You want to stay at our place?" Reyna continued as she got back onto her feet and off her seat.

"Yes please!" Thalia said winsomely, (not that she knew what 'winsomely" was and called herself asexual instead, but somehow, when it came to Reyna, no one believed it). "Can we?"

"Let's go and talk to mom and dad – maybe they'll have an idea," Reyna muttered, as the four of them went downhill, away from the railroad tracks. "And if not, I genuinely look up to the possibility of sleeping in the attic – it is quite cool, actually, what with the thunderstorm coming up-"

There was a pause as Reyna just sighed and pointed at the sky: the clear blue of the morning was now gone, replaced by thick, opaque and murky rain clouds. "That thunderstorm," she said simply. "Seriously, people, are you blind?"

"The dogs distracted us," Piper replied brightly, "and what's that smell?"

'That smell' was coming from Reyna's foster home, and she knew it well. "It's pumpkin soup," she blinked in surprise.

"You tell me," Piper understood the other girl perfectly. "It may be October, but it's just the beginning of October. What gives?"

"I don't know, but let's find out?" Reyna suggested brightly, and the other three teens, (not counting the dogs) joined in eagerly – this was a much better pastime than discussing the oddities of the Grace family's matriarch, and they just raced back down the wooded hill to the home in question.

…Behind them, the railroad rumbled with the sound of yet another approaching train. Back in the overcast sky, the thunder of an approaching storm echoed right back.

End


End file.
